Architectural

Storage is the single hardest problem in our domain. Storage related tradeoffs are sometimes the hardest tradeoffs to tackle. Storage decisions often impact every other design decision. I don't know why we are acting like it ain't so.

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

Locked Doors

A jaw-dropping twist this morning to the story of the Colombian IT guy who helped the FBI crack El Chapo's encrypted comms network.
He also helped the feds tap the kingpin's texts w/his wiife, Emma Coronel, taking us deep into the intimacies (and crimes) of their marriage.

None of the Above

in college we named our intramural softball team “NO GAME SCHEDULED” because if the other team didn’t show up they lost their league deposit and
forfeited. it worked several times. everyone hated us and nothing as cool as that has happened to me since.

Design Objective

Consumers’ growing interest in used fashion — which means more people are wearing clothing from different seasons and eras, all at the same time — supports the idea of the Big Flat Now. Similarly, Instagram is filled with fan accounts dedicated to the pop culture and style of basically every decade, including the ’00s; follow a bunch of them and suddenly time is a flat circle.

Lines of Code

// ==================================================================
// PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SIMPLIFY THIS CODE.
// KEEP THE SPACE SHUTTLE FLYING.
// ==================================================================
//
// This controller is intentionally written in a very verbose style. You will
// notice:
//
// 1. Every 'if' statement has a matching 'else' (exception: simple error
// checks for a client API call)
// 2. Things that may seem obvious are commented explicitly
//
// We call this style 'space shuttle style'. Space shuttle style is meant to
// ensure that every branch and condition is considered and accounted for -
// the same way code is written at NASA for applications like the space
// shuttle.
//
// . . .

By 1958 FORTRAN II had been released and other computer manufacturers were offering FORTRAN compatibility. It was the start of the separation of software from hardware, as programming became a platform-independent skill. But the big leap took place eight years later.

Devoops

Peopleware

For many office workers, the answer may be as simple as delaying work start times an hour or two — say until 9:30 or 10 a.m. Since many people are in the middle of the chronotype continuum and wake naturally around 8 or 9 a.m., such a modest shift could provide widespread relief. “We’re talking about one hour,” Ms. Kring said, “not a revolution.”

Hopefully you have already gathered that management is a career change, not a promotion, and you’re aware that nobody is very good at it when they first start.

That’s okay! It takes a solid year or two to find new rhythms and reward mechanisms before you can even begin to find your own voice or trust your judgment. Management problems look easy, deceptively so. It’s really hard to generalize here, but reasons this is hard include:

Locked Doors

uncaptcha2 Using Google tech to defeat Google tech, this project defeats Google's ReCaptcha by asking for the audio challenge, and then using Google's Speech2Text API to submit the answer. 🤦‍♂️

None of the Above

At journalism school, I was told that you get one exclamation point to use in your entire career, so you should use it wisely. You could, perhaps, spend your one exclamation point on a headline like “WAR OVER!” but nothing less would merit one.
...
After we spoke, McCulloch ran a Twitter poll asking: “If I wanted to convey genuine enthusiasm to you, how many exclamation marks would I need?” After nearly 800 votes, the winner was three.

When you start looking at a post about some foreign language's oddly specific word for something that you never thought there would be a specific word for, remember that English has a specific word for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up".

English also has a single word for "manipulation of electoral boundaries to reduce the influence of opposing political groups in future elections".

We’ve “killed” diamonds because we’re getting married later (or not at all), and if or when we do, it’s rare for one partner to have the financial stability to set aside the traditional two months’ salary for a diamond engagement ring. We’re killing antiques, opting instead for “fast furniture” — not because we hate our grandparents’ old items, but because we’re chasing stable employment across the country, and lugging old furniture and fragile china costs money that we don’t have.
...
But individual action isn’t enough. Personal choices alone won’t keep the planet from dying, or get Facebook to quit violating our privacy. To do that, you need paradigm-shifting change. Which helps explain why so many millennials increasingly identify with democratic socialism and are embracing unions: We are beginning to understand what ails us, and it’s not something an oxygen facial or a treadmill desk can fix.

Product Roadmaps should be outcome-focused (OKRs, problems to solve, etc.). Release Plans should be more output-focused (features, timelines, etc.). This is where I'm seeing the rubber hitting the road with teams becoming Feature Factories. They're given output-focused roadmaps

Eric Jorgenson I use Linkedin, but I don't ever enjoy it, so this strikes a chord:

Linkedin is the kind of product you get if you always take the winner of the A/B test, even if users will obviously hate you for it.

Lingua Scripta

Lines of Code

Architectural

Once you have a working (green) build on a skeleton solution (i.e., one that compiles and runs at least one dummy test), the build must not go red. This is an exercise on delivering as a team WITHOUT BREAKING THE BUILD. OK? If the build goes red again, the exercise is over. (11/)

The team has 1 hour to deliver a working solution they can demonstrate to the "customer" (12/12)

Peopleware

Thinking is by far the most underrated activity.
People consider it "unproductive" to sit on a bench and think.
So they spend their lives doing things they never thought through.
An hour of clear thinking,
can yield a conclusion that changes your life.

Teamwork

It’s always worth spending 15 min extra on a chart. Otherwise you bring some really cool insight to a meeting and people are like “uh, the y axis has a confusing label” or “why are the lines colors so similar”.

This mindset separates good employees from excellent ones. Leadership-minded people proactively improve and develop their environment — their product, their codebase, their colleagues, their teams. Over time, these little improvements multiply and make a huge difference.

Dev to manager Interviews with experienced software developers on moving to management.

Locked Doors

Please, please - if you’re a security professional with the ear of executives who travel, highly encourage them to buy privacy screens. Watching an exec with a big financial firm working on all his numbers in a spreadsheet just in front of me.

So, a shipment of crickets for the lizard arrived via FedEx today. It was my first time ordering bulk crickets off the internet, and I naively assumed that they would be in like, a bag or some other contraption to facilitate easy transfer to another container. They were not.

Forcing kids and teens to read centuries-old “classic literature” about a very slim subset of the population, living experiences they can’t relate to, is the most surefire way to kill the future of books.

Design Objective

The State of UX in 2019 Where to begin? I thought this would be another "hot UI trends for 2019 that will make you look cool to your Dribble friends", but this article is much better than that.

It talks about the evolving roles and expectations from UX designers. The industry's moral and ethical responsiblity, and doing right by the users. Ponders the Vim vs Emacs question of UX: should designers code? And many other serious topics.

If you read one thing this week, I recommend this link *.

As an industry we have become obsessed with our design methods. Some designers are so addicted to following the specific set of steps outlined in a playbook, or filling out a persona template that they found online, that they forget to reflect on why they are using that method in the first place. That extreme focus on output rather than outcome can be extremely dangerous to Design as a profession , creating a whole generation of designers who always have to be told what to do next.

* Ironically, the overly fancy UI makes reading this article painful, and it crashes Safari. Use reader mode or Instapaper or something like that.

Pple think they prefer restaurants 1) quiet so they can tawk, 2) roomy, 3) no line.

Yet they flock to 1) loud, 2) cramped restaurants 3) w/50 min wait.

Never ask pple what they want, watch what they do. Revelation of preferences.

#SkinInTheGame

Reimagining the Morning Briefing New York Times iterating on their Morning Briefing email, has lessons that apply to other products that need to communicate to people.

Also, bold lead-ins is a great idea for office memos and such:

We use bold lead-ins as labels, to help the reader know what kind information they are being offered. “How we know” allows us to give a behind-the-scenes look into The Times and reveal a little bit about the reporting process — like how many months our journalists spent reading through secret documents for a particular story. Other lead-ins: “Why it matters,” “Background” and “Another angle.”

For a developer who takes pride in her work, eight weeks of trudging through a swamp of technical debt is crushing. As a PM, you know the concrete costs that come with each day your fixes aren't yet live, and there are also the intangible costs to your development team—a loss of trust and faith in you as a leader, in the project, and in the team to get things done.

Tools of the Trade

Is there a project you’ve always wanted to start or contribute to, but you haven’t had the time or resources to do so? Now’s your chance: apply to RC this winter for a one, six, or 12-week retreat. We’ll provide up to $10,000 in funding (depending on batch length), 24/7 access to our space, and a supportive community of fellow programmers.

When you are hired... no one will ask you what "best" framework is. You will be coding in what is already set up and available by the lead engineer. Don't try to learn every single thing out there. Learn to adapt.

Yikes! VS Code is eating everyone else's lunch! The story here is pretty clear. Over the past year, VS Code usage has gone from 5% to 22%. Over the same time, Sublime Text usage has fallen from 17% to 11%, and Atom usage has fallen from 11% to 6%. Even Eclipse is falling. And VS Code is accelerating every month.

Architectural

Not just choice of language, but tool, and precise control over execution. For example, the Node|Solid runtime bundles Node 10 and code instrumentation:

In essence, N|Solid for AWS Lambda is an augmented Node.js runtime that enables extraction of metrics with as little overhead possible. This is achievable thanks to the approach we’ve taken with the N|Solid Agent – it sits outside of the Node.js event loop in the native C++ layer, meaning that your application’s performance isn’t affected while being monitored.

Teamwork

4/8 Feature-based roadmaps are often used because "everyone in the organization needs to know what's coming!" Fair point. But what if I told you that this need causes premature convergence which impacts outcomes?

Locked Doors

I cannot emphasize enough to skeptical security people about LetsEncrypt autoenrollment:
Manual certificate cycling is a massive operational risk that makes IT hesitant to enforce encrypted communications. The old way is not the best way. It’s time to move

Still, the decline in Facebook audience over the past 18 months translates into a loss of at least $600,000 just from advertising (not counting donations or subscriptions that won’t happen when people don’t see our stories). That’s a big part of the reason why we need to raise $400,000 this month. It’s a big goal, more than what we did in December ’16 and ’17—because it has to be. We can’t pull back from investigating right now, with the stakes so high.

None of the Above

My new requirement is that if my kid wants to download a new app, she has to write a one page report on the founders, company story, and business model so that she understands how the app benefits from her use.

A social media phenomena to be aware of: After a certain number of likes/shares on a post, sometimes people think person is overwhelmed and doesn’t need help anymore. When in reality everyone’s thinking that & the person ends up with very little help. Always reach out to check!

Design Objective

Adrienne Porter Felt Who counts as a family? According to @cvspharmacy, all parents must share the same last name as their child. Some developer added an if-check, probably without thinking about it too much, and ended up codifying their own cultural norms into the medical system.

Everyone is a UX designer.

Including developers writing validation checks to match business rules. And the policy/product people who made those rules.

The UX Uncanny Valley We often talk about reducing options, to avoid the paradox of choice. But the reverse is also true. Introducing — or not hiding — unnecessary options, so as to give the user an illusion of control.

Google Maps, for instance, will show you several route options even though users will likely go with the suggested option. There is a sense of security in knowing that you’ve chosen a lesser of evils.

Product + Design without Technology is Vaporware. We have a great idea and people seem to want it. But we can’t build it.Design + Technology without Product is a Hackathon Project. It looks great and it’s even fully functional, but there’s no market for it.Product + Technology without Design is an Office Printer. The necessary evils of the world that are completely at risk of being disrupted by a customer-centric innovation. Think Netflix, Airbnb, Uber again (man it would be great if someone created the “Uber of Printers”).

Peopleware

Notes on Hyperfocus On managing your attention, focusings on tasks, avoiding distractions, and also setting time for scattered thoughts.

Beyond that, the advice is to do it as often as possible, especially when need to work on a complex task. One interesting thought is that if you find you are resisting focusing on a task to reduce the time until the point where that resistance disappears. Complex tasks will require multiple slots.

deep work update #2 Related, how about scheduling every minute of your day? Would that work for you?

Team Work

I recently left a position as a tech lead and I thought I would share some of valuable lessons I learned during that time. A proverbial thread, if you will.

Locked Doors

I don't know what to say. #116 So this happened. An NPM package with 2 million weekly downloads was injected with malicious code. Seems to be stealing Bitcoin wallets. Good chance one of your projects is using this package directly or indirectly.

Gary Bernhardt And yes, this was something many people saw coming. But it was also convenient to bursh aside, to evangelize Node and the "many small modules" philosophy:

There was an option 3: don't decompose your application's dependency graph into thousands of packages. People who argued that position were dismissed as (to paraphrase heavily) old and slow. That ship has sailed, and now we're here.

Techtopia

Ad-diction

When someone starts an argument with "I'm not a scientist, but..." maybe we should stop listening to them weighing in on science. And maybe news shows should stop asking these pundits to talk about something they’re not qualified to talk about.

Payless, a brand known for budget-friendly shoes, opened a fake pop-up store called "Palessi" in a Los Angeles mall and invited influencers to the grand opening. The store was stocked with Payless shoes in disguise.

"I would pay $400 or $500," a woman says in a TV ad, holding a pair of $19.99 sneakers. Another shopper calls the Payless shoes "elegant and sophisticated."

Mike Rosenberg An explanation of how democratic elections work in the US:

North Carolina: Democrats won 48% of votes and 23% of seats
Ohio: Democrats won nearly 50% of votes and 25% of seats

Pennsylvania, new court-ordered nonpartisan map: Dems won 55% of votes and 50% of seats, up from 28% of seats under old map